Oscars: Real History Is Far More Intriguing than Reel History

Bruce Chadwick lectures on history and film at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News. Mr. Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.

It’s Oscar time once again on Sunday
and the controversy over history in films exceeds that of the gowns
worn by all the glamourous women on the red carpet.

Several
Oscar Best Picture nominees have been lashed by critics for their
misguided history. The character of Alan Turing in The Imitation
Game was criticized by many as too strident, unlike the real
Turing. CNN aired a news piece in which the veracity of American
Sniper author Chris Kyle, the hero of the book and movie, was
attacked. Selma has been flogged over its muddled history for
months.

The
movie colony is not alone. Plays and television shows have been
charged with historical misinformation for years, too.

The three Oscar nominee movies are just the latest in a long line of
very good films that have been chastised for distorting history. The
slanting of history in the arts goes all the way back to 1851, when
artist Emmanuel Leutze painted the famous portrait of George
Washington standing up in his boat as he and his men crossed the
Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776 (the General was actually
sitting down). In 1915, writer Thomas Dixon Jr. and film director
D.W. Griffith twisted history in the racially horrific Birth of a
Nation. Remember the tangled story of boxer Hurricane Carter in
Hurricane? The crazy, widespread conspiracies in Oliver
Stone’s JFK? Just about any of the 1950s western television
series? And just last week, critics in Poland lambasted film director
Pawel Pawlikowski’s foreign language Oscar nominee Ida
because the film did not emphasize that it was the Nazis, not the
Polish government, that ran the Holocaust in Poland during World War
II that took the lives of millions of Jews.

This is not new. It
has been going on for generations. Do you remember the 1950s film The
Bridge on the River Kwai? Not only did the film producers savage
the history of British soldiers in Burma in World War II, but
presented a movie in which the bridge over the river Kwai wasn’t
even over the River Kwai.

The
director of the television mini-series George Wallace shot a
scene, that he admitted was made up, of an African-American worker in
Wallace’s mansion considering murdering him with an ice pick. In
the 2000 film U-571, an American submarine captures an enigma
(intelligence) machine from a German U-boat. Well, it was really a
British team that did that. Everybody in Britain was so
furious that Parliament actually condemned the film,

How
about Kevin Costner’s epic revision of history in Thirteen Days,
the story of the Cuban missile crisis as seen through the eyes of
White House aide Ken O’Donnell. The real crisis was powerful drama
and did not need Costner’s new look at it. You can’t find a much
more dramatic story than the threat of nuclear annihilation. Why
twist it to make O’Donnell, and not JFK, the hero? George S. Patton
pulling out his pearl handled revolvers in North Africa and firing at
attacking German planes in Patton? Never happened. Wasn’t
the heroic Patton, with all his flaws, a good enough story?

The
moguls in Hollywood take no blame. They beat their chests and roar
that “it’s just a movie,” to cover up their assassination on
history. Another of their defenses: we have to make an engaging film
and real history is not that engaging. A third defense: You want an
authentic movie about World War II: we’ll give you a movie, all
right but its four years long. And finally: hey, we just changed
things a little but had the spirit of the true story.

Well,
the spirit is just not the same. Lyndon Johnson was a hero in
the Civil Rights fight, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and
numerous other white and black men and women. Ava DuVernay, the
director of Selma, not only dismissed him, but presented LBJ
as a Presidential ogre intent on derailing the movement. She then
said, as they all do, that’s it’s just a movie, just one
interpretation of events.

Now,
Hollywood has made transgressions that you can forgive, such as the
real Bonnie and Clyde looking nothing like glamourous Warren Beatty
and Faye Dunaway, or the kindly, loving portrait of Robert Stroud,
the Birdman of Alcatraz, who was really a psychotic. What real life
characters had the glamor of Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp? How many
World War II soldiers had the swagger of John Wayne? We can forgive
that. The overt revision of history, as was done in Selma,
cannot be ignored, though.

The big problem
is that Americans don’t read much anymore and are getting their
history lessons from movies. Historian Simon Schama wrote that the
screenwriters are now the ones who decide what a nation’s history
is, not the historians.

Kim
Peirce, the director of Boys Don’t Cry (1999), is a shining
example of that. Her drama was a film charged with inaccuracies. She
fumed that “You can change facts. You can change characters. You
can change everything in search of the truth.” Huh?

A
long string of big, colorful, dramatic events make up the American
story from D-Day to Selma to San Juan Hill to Gettysburg to lynchings
to murders to injustices against minorities and the oppression of
women. Hollywood can produce movies about all of them and stick to
the truth. The truth of them is far more intriguing than Hollywood’s
perception of history, quickly written besides some pool. You need to
embellish the larger than life story of Lyndon Johnson? Of Martin
Luther king Jr.? Come on.

The
easiest way for Hollywood to solve its problems with history is, as I
have written before for HNN, just add extra thirty seconds of
dialogue. The screenwriters should have one character turn to another
and tell the true history of the event. Thirty seconds, that’s all.
Or, as Hollywood did back in the 1930s, run a scroll at the start of
the picture to say something like: “This is a fictional movie set
in Poland, where the Nazis conducted the Holocaust after overrunning
the country.” Problem solved.

It
works, and works well. Look at the success, in glowing reviews,
Oscars and box office tallies, of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s
masterful portrait of the sixteenth President. He gave the country a
terrific look at the political genius of Lincoln, warts and all, plus
his feisty wife and angry son. It was gripping and it was real. It
was far better than the dozens of heroic, syrupy stories about
Lincoln that have cluttered the screen since the birth of film at the
turn of the century. The truth of Lincoln was much better than
the fiction.

These
are all suggestions to obtain better films and also get Hollywood,
the theater and television off the hook. Audiences love history, but
they want accurate history.

Will
the moguls listen? Of course not.

I
know what we’ll see next on the silver screen: Joe Frazier knocks
out Muhammad Ali in the “thriller in Manila.” Ali then looks into
the camera and says he lost because he was out of shape after his two
tours of duty with the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War.